NVIDIA building GeForce GTX 280 GX2?

A statement made by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the firm's fiscal Q2 2009 earnings sparked rumours that the graphics firm might be working on a dual-GPU card with two GeForce GTX 280. I'm not sure if this will be possible with the current 65nm GT200 GPUs but it should be feasible to build such a card with the 55nm GT200b GPUs which are expected later this quarter.

Hans Mosesmann - Raymond James

Jen-Hsun, a couple of questions; the way NVIDIA introduced GPUs into the marketplace, a single GPU at the high-end and you cascade going forward into higher volume segments -- has that strategy changed in relation to what AMD has done here with their strategy?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Hans, you might recall, we were actually the world’s first GX2 and I forget which chip we did it with -- was it 7900? I think it was 7900 we introduced the world’s first GX2.

We’ve got nothing against GX2s and recently, we just had another GX2 with the 9800 GX2. It has its advantages and disadvantages and so I don’t know that there’s any particular philosophical approach that we take here. We just have to look at the market and build the right product.

From a scalability perspective, single-chip is always better than two. I mean, if you take a look at the scalability of crossfire and you compare that to SLI, if you take your top 200 most popular games, SLI or GeForce GTX 280, the scalability across those 200 games is 100%. Every one of those 200 games are going to scale when you put a GTX on it. When you put SLI on it, those 200 games, the vast majority of them will scale, maybe 90% of them will scale. And with crossfire, a lot less will scale. And so when you use an X2 with crossfire, you are just going to see a lot less scalability. There are many games that don’t scale and there are some games that even get worse in scaling.

So you just have to take it case by case and -- but we think our approach is the right approach. The best approach is to do both. If we could offer a single chip solution at 399, it certainly doesn’t preclude us from building a two-chip solution at something higher. So I think that having the right price, right product at each price point and the best-performing product at each price point is the most important thing.